The Defense Industrial Base has over 100,000 defense companies and subcontractors supporting contracts under the Department of Defense.
That’s a ton of organizations advertising for job opportunities to cleared candidates. So how do you get candidates who are searching through job openings to land on your careers page and click on your website? The answer is to employ search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that push your company to the top of their google searches.
Google’s search functionality uses rankings, with SEO being the highest in importance, is a practice created to put your link in a better position amongst all of webpages that turn up when someone is organically searching a topic. The result is, the better the SEO strategy, the increased chance that your company page will be seen.
The Power of Keywords
Candidates who visit company pages to find a new job usually input keywords that relate to the job they are seeking – i.e., “intelligence analyst openings, Washington DC”, “TS/SCI network engineer jobs in Virginia”, or “polygraph jobs at CIA” to name a few.
When writing your job description, you should think about potential search terms that candidates would use as they navigate job listings. They aren’t likely typing in similar words to what your Statement of Work (SOW) notes for labor categories, so it’s up to your recruitment team to make the best decision in terms of titles of job requisitions so you catch the most potential candidate’s searches.
Essentially, your job description is all about keywords. Instead of pulling a vague description from copied and pasted documents over the years, you will want to speak with the team lead, hiring manager, or other team members about what tools you can disclose in the description, or what military occupational specialty (or other code) would best fit in to this role. This way you will be actually listing keywords that cleared candidates will be searching for online.
QUICK SEO TIPS to Remember
It takes a little bit of brain power and time to create SEO-optimized web pages like a careers page, but it’s totally worth it. Try some of these tweaks or bring it up in your next recruiting tag up and brainstorm ideas – you may get a spike in clicks over the next week.
- If you’re a small contractor, look at what some of the larger, more popular defense contractors are listing as titles for similar descriptions and replicate.
- Ask your PM if you are able to list the customer, and if it is an attractive agency, include those acronyms.
- Right now, remote work is a hot commodity in the cleared world – so include “FULLY REMOTE” in the job title as candidates are likely using that search term.
It’s no longer just recruiting, people. Recruitment marketing is the key to ensuring your company is even seen on the web.
THEÂ CLEARED RECRUITINGÂ CHRONICLES: YOUR WEEKLY DoD RECRUITING TIPS TO OUT COMPETE THE NEXT NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFER.
